The Eleventh Gordon Research Conference on Fertilization and the Activation of Development will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of new developments and ideas in this exciting, rapidly advancing field. This meeting will be held at the Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire, July 27 - August 1, 1997. This conference has been held every two years since 1974 and is the only Gordon Research Conference concerned with the interaction of the male and the female gametes in the vital process of fertilization and activation of the fertilized egg to begin the process of embryo formation. It provides a venue for the interaction of biochemists, cell biologists, molecular biologists, physiologists, and biophysicists working in the field. This conference has been singularly successful in fostering collaborations between widely disparate experience and seniority and between research laboratories in this country and in Europe, Japan, Australia and Latin America. These collaborations have borne many fruitful results. There will be nine sessions in the conference, following the Gordon Research Conference format: 1) The mechanism of sperm activation; 2) Penetration of egg surface coats and sperm-egg binding; 3) Initiation of egg activation; 4) Egg activation pathways; 5) Plenary Lecture on signal transduction; 6) Membrane fusion mechanisms; 7) The cell cycle and early development; 8) Current topics and contributed papers; 9) Integrins and disintegrins in fertilization. This will be a truly international meeting with speakers and discussion leaders from Europe 97), Mid East (1), Far East (2) and Central America (1) as well as the U.S. (24). Among these 35 speakers are eight women and three representing ethnic minorities.